since you managed to avoid calling people antisemitic this time i guess we can try a conversation.
Quote:
The debates over "two powers" theology in rabbinic literature occurs well after Christianity is trinitarian
i don't think this is correct at all. there are three ways to look at the whole thing.
one, that there is a continuity of belief that was also consistently condemned as a heresy (static belief on "both sides"). this presumes a kind of nascent orthodoxy or at least competing proto-orthodoxies.
the second is that there was a developed belief which began as orthodox or tolerable, and as it developed became heretical or intolerable. here you have a change on only one "side" and you have a singular continuous orthodoxy on the other.
the third is that there is a post-facto condemnation - a continuity of belief that was later rejected by a developed orthodoxy in Rabbinic Judaism. in this case you also have a change on only one side, but the opposite way around - instead of the "two powers" side evolving to go from an orthodox to heretical position, you have the Rabbinic side moving what is acceptable away from the proto-orthodox two powers side.
The third seems by far the most likely to me, and the easiest witnesses to it are Philo, St Paul, and St John. None seem aware that identifying the Logos as part of the godhead is controversial or feel the need to defend it as orthodox. Even in St Justin's
Dialogue with Trypho - which seems to genuinely attempt to represent and interact with normative Jewish beliefs - the Jews with Trypho and Typho himself accept without argument that there is a second power, or at the least Justin doesn't seem compelled to defend the idea as orthodox at all.
in order to condemn an idea as heretical you need two things: a clearly divergent set of ideas, and a body with sufficient authority to pronounce that condemnation. the reality is in the first century you had the former but not the latter. but even then, there isn't a hint at all in the first century that the identification of Logos as God - whether by Philo or anyone else - was in and of itself problematic.
At any rate Segal who is generally considered the leading scholar on this and wrote a book by the name of Two Powers said it wasn't deemed heretical until the 2nd century but traced the roots of the idea back to ~200 BC. So your initial statement is simply incorrect to begin with, especially considering that the Trinitarian view of Christianity is present from the start on the pages of the NT.
Quote:
Suggesting the imposition of the nature of Judaism comes from the outside is also a bizarre reading of the evidence of the debates and discussions within Jewish spaces in Israel and in the first century diaspora.
that isn't what I said. I said the
category of Judaism as distinct from Christian is political. The idea of a faith or religion as a separate thing from a people is an external idea. Judaism is the religion of the Judaeans. If there are multiple distinct beliefs practiced in Judaea, there are many Judaisms, even if they are contradictory. This is the absolute clear assumption from both Roman (Cassius Dio, or Seutonius) and Jewish sources at the time (e.g. Josephus or Philo). The ficus Iudaicus was a huge driving factor in a distinction between Jews and Christian. Judaism was first defined as a religion rather than by birth by the Roman Emperor Nerva in 96 AD who removed the "calumnia" of the Jews by allowing non-practicing Jews to not pay the Jewish tax regardless of their ethnicity. The whole idea of religion as we think of it today is completely foreign to Judaism. In the end what divided Christianity from Judaism was the laws of the Roman Empire.
Quote:
Your own arguments ignore the wildly different sects of Christian belief and theology in the first couple of centuries and the clear development of ideas not found in traditional or even esoteric Jewish second temple beliefs. You want to draw a straight line for Christianity but not Judaism and it doesn't work.
i never said any of that. there were different sects that could be potentially included in a category called Christian. the problem is that those category lines are drawn post-facto by ignorant moderns to put people into neat buckets. These lines often have almost nothing to do with how people lived their lives or with what they believed and almost always impose anachronistic concepts to make these distinctions, like the very idea of religion or the completely laughable anachronism of monotheism.